Biography

Almut Hintze studied Indo-European philology at the Universities of Heidelberg and Oxford and earned her PhD in Indo-Iranian Studies at the University of Erlangen. After her habilitation in Berlin with a study of the semantics of “reward” in Ancient Iranian (Avestan) and Vedic Sanskrit texts, she spent a term at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Subsequently she became Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge and was appointed to the Zartoshty Brothers post at SOAS in 2001.

Research

Indo-Iranian philology, Zoroastrian literature and religion.

Corpus Avesticum: Digital Yasna

Yasna is the name of the central ritual text of Zoroastrianism, the religion of pre-Islamic Iran. Originally composed in the ancient Iranian language of Avestan between the 2nd and 1st millennia BCE, the Yasna was translated into the Pahlavi language during the first millennium CE. The Pahlavi version in turn served as the basis for a Sanskrit version traditionally ascribed to the Zoroastrian priest Neryosangh Dhaval, who lived around the 12th cent. CE. The Digital Yasna project explores avenues to transform digital images of Avestan manuscripts into computer-readable romanised form using a mark-up language such as XML-TEI P5.

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